Easify Forums BBCode Explained

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How to create bold, italic and underlined text

BBCode includes tags to allow you to quickly change the basic style of your text. This is achieved in the following ways:

To make a piece of text bold enclose it in [b][/b], e.g.

[b]Hello[/b]

will become Hello

For underlining use [u][/u], for example:

[u]Good Morning[/u]

becomes Good Morning

To italicise text use [i][/i], e.g.

This is [i]Great![/i]

would give This is Great!

Quoting text in replies

There are two ways you can quote text, with a reference or without.

When you utilise the Quote function to reply to a post on the board you should notice that the post text is added to the message window enclosed in a [quote=""][/quote] block. This method allows you to quote with a reference to a person or whatever else you choose to put! For example to quote a piece of text Mr. Blobby wrote you would enter:

[quote="Mr. Blobby"]The text Mr. Blobby wrote would go here[/quote]

The resulting output will automatically add "Mr. Blobby wrote:" before the actual text. Remember you must include the quotation marks "" around the name you are quoting, they are not optional.

The second method allows you to blindly quote something. To utilise this enclose the text in [quote][/quote] tags. When you view the message it will simply show the text within a quotation block.

Outputting code or fixed width data

If you want to output a piece of code or in fact anything that requires a fixed width, e.g. Courier type font you should enclose the text in [code][/code] tags, e.g.

[code]echo "This is some code";[/code]

All formatting used within [code][/code] tags is retained when you later view it. PHP syntax highlighting can be enabled using [code=php][/code] and is recommended when posting PHP code samples as it improves readability.

Creating an Unordered list

BBCode supports two types of lists, unordered and ordered. They are essentially the same as their HTML equivalents. An unordered list outputs each item in your list sequentially one after the other indenting each with a bullet character. To create an unordered list you use [list][/list] and define each item within the list using [*]. For example to list your favourite colours you could use:

[list]
[*]
Red
[*]
Blue
[*]
Yellow
[/list]

This would generate the following list:

Red

Blue

Yellow

Linking to another site

phpBB BBCode supports a number of ways of creating URIs (Uniform Resource Indicators) better known as URLs.

The first of these uses the [url=][/url] tag, whatever you type after the = sign will cause the contents of that tag to act as a URL. For example to link to phpBB.com you could use:

[url=http://www.easify.co.uk/]Visit Easify![/url]

This would generate the following link, Visit Easify! Please notice that the link opens in the same window or a new window depending on the users browser preferences.

If you want the URL itself displayed as the link you can do this by simply using:

As with all the BBCode tags you can wrap URLs around any of the other tags such as [img][/img] (see next entry), [b][/b], etc. As with the formatting tags it is up to you to ensure the correct open and close order is following, for example:

is not correct which may lead to your post being deleted so take care.

Adding an image to a post

BBCode incorporates a tag for including images in your posts. Two very important things to remember when using this tag are: many users do not appreciate lots of images being shown in posts and secondly the image you display must already be available on the internet (it cannot exist only on your computer for example, unless you run a webserver!). To display an image you must surround the URL pointing to the image with [img][/img] tags. For example:

[img]http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif[/img]

As noted in the URL section above you can wrap an image in a [url][/url] tag if you wish, e.g.